Links for December 30th through January 4th

Posted on January 4, 2013 by Vinny

Why Your Next Cloud App Will Probably Suck Without….Unit Testing – Put simply, developers use unit tests as an internal control on the functionality and compatibility of their applications when changes to features, code or the environment happen.
Hacking Knowledge: How to Learn Faster, Deeper, and Better in the 21st Century | OEDb – We've collected some amazing tips and tricks (an update of our earlier article, almost seven years old now) you can use to help you get the most out of the time you spend learning. From study suggestions to brain hacks, these tips are sure to help you learn faster, deeper, and better, no matter the subject.
America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead – Cleaning up the rest of the lead that remains in our environment could turn out to be the cheapest, most effective crime prevention tool we have. And we could start doing it tomorrow.
Advanced NFL Stats: Play-by-Play Data – I've recently completed a project to compile publicly-available NFL play-by-play data. It took a while, but now it's ready.
Introduction to Spring Data Neo4j | Architects Zone – Here's a 1-hour practical guide to getting started with Spring Data on Neo4j. This will cover Spring Data Neo4j's features/benefits, use cases, and a step by step demo.
The future according to Google’s Larry Page – Fortune Tech – Google CEO Larry Page envisions a future in which computers plan your vacations, drive your cars, and anticipate your whims. Audacious? Maybe. But Page's dreams have a way of coming true.
Seven Deadly Sins of Modern Objective-C – We're all guilty of some Objective-C sins, I'm sure, but the important thing is to improve. We're at the dawn of a new year. Why not take this opportunity to reflect on why you've been so sinful and find ways to code more virtuously in the new year?
Introducing Spring Scala – The goal of the Spring Scala project is simply to make it easier to use the Spring framework in Scala. We believe that there are many Spring users out there who want to try Scala out, but do not want to leave their experience with Spring behind. This project is meant for those people.
Sublime Package Control – a Sublime Text 2 Package Manager by wbond – A full-featured package manager that helps discovering, installing, updating and removing packages for Sublime Text 2. It features an automatic upgrader and supports GitHub, BitBucket and a full channel/repository system.
Eve is a multipurpose, web based agent platform that uses existing protocols for communication (HTTP, XMPP, JSON-RPC) – Eve is a multipurpose, web based agent platform. The project aims to develop an open protocol for communication between software agents. Eve is designed as a decentral, scalable system for autonomously acting agents. Eve uses the existing world wide web as platform, and uses existing protocols for communication (HTTP, XMPP, JSON-RPC).
twig-persist – Object Datastore for Google App Engine – Twig is an object persistence interface built on Google App Engine's low-level datastore which overcomes many of JDO-GAEs limitations including improved support for inheritance, polymorphism and generic types. You can easily configure, modify or extend Twigs behaviour by implementing your own strategies or overriding extension points in pure Java code.
OWNER – Java properties files made super simple! – The goal of OWNER API is to minimize the code required to handle application configuration through Java properties files. The inspiring idea for this API comes from GWT i18n
Java.next() -> Scala or Groovy? – Generally the understanding is that scala has the ability to disrupt the status quo rather than incrementally improving it like Groovy. Scala has done and doing good job of reducing the cost of abstraction transliterate Java into Scala and end up with bytecode that is almost exactly the same. Scala has some original good ideas and well thought out type system.
Windows 8 proving less popular than Vista | KitGuru – Data from Net Applications shows that Windows 8 is less popular than Windows Vista, the operating system that proved unpopular with the enthusiast audience.
Antivirus Makers Work on Software to Catch Malware More Effectively – NYTimes.com – Consumers and businesses spend billions of dollars every year on antivirus software. But these programs rarely, if ever, block freshly minted computer viruses, experts say, because the virus creators move too quickly. That is prompting start-ups and other companies to get creative about new approaches to computer security.
HtmlUnit vs JSoup: html parsing in Java – In this blog I will compare JSoup with other similar framework, HtmlUnit. Apparently both of them are good Html parsing frameworks and both can be used for web application unit testing and web scraping. In this blog, I will explain how HtmlUnit is better suited for web application unit testing automation and JSoup is better suited for Web Scraping.
Progress of Happiness – The first is that sucking at something is the first step of getting better at it. And that trying really hard isn’t supposed to be easy. In fact, getting better at anything isn’t supposed to be easy. You are bound to get fail, get hurt, fail again before you succeed.
Microsoft WebMatrix – Open Source Web Applications Made Easier – Open source web apps make it easy to get started developing websites, but they can sometimes be time-consuming to get configured on your computer. WebMatrix makes it simple and straightforward.
Safeguard Your Phone from Malware – WSJ.com – According to a report by research group Juniper Networks, JNPR -2.07% hackers are increasingly targeting smartphones and other mobile devices with malicious software (also known as malware) to gain access to personal information. The threat is still small in comparison to computers, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't take precautions to protect your smartphone.

Links for December 16th through December 19th

Posted on December 19, 2012 by Vinny

Properly testing Spring MVC controllers – Spring Test MVC is indispensable if you want to test your Spring MVC controllers. Simply testing the controller methods without including the Spring MVC framework itself, is useless. Spring Test MVC will be included in the Spring 3.2 release (so I'm told) but for now it can be found on Github:
Manage Your Database Schema in IntelliJ IDEA 12 – A while ago we shared this video with a quick overview of how to set up a connection to a database, use smart completion (even for SQL queries within Java), on-the-fly code analysis, navigation (between queries and database), search (for tables and fields), and more cool features.
Now, please enjoy a new video with even more exciting features available in IntelliJ IDEA 12 for working with databases:
Sublime Text 2 screencast that explores the basics and expanded features of ST2 – Sublime Text is taking the programming community by storm, and rapidly unseating incumbents like TextMate and Vim for many programmers. This screencast series teaches you Sublime Text’s layout, navigation, and flow. You will also learn how to use more advanced features, such as tweaking the program’s interface or installing custom plugins. You’ll even incorporate the vast library of TextMate themes and plugins into the Sublime Text environment. This screencast teaches both the basics and expanded features of ST2, and accelerates you along the learning curve needed to become rapidly productive with this powerful editor.
JUnit Strikes Back | Tomek’s blog – There are also some new project emerging around JUnit, like the new initiative of providing Data Driven Testing to JUnit ( see EasyTest) or another attempt at parameterized tests (see Zohhak).
A programmer’s guide to big data: 12 tools to know — Data | GigaOM – But whatever the case, if your job revolves around writing code rather than data flows, you might need a little help. Here are 12 tools (listed alphabetically) that aim to help
Billions Of Reasons To Get Ready For Big Data – Forbes – Whether you know it or not, you've probably already experienced one of the next big things in IT.
New Features and Enhancements in Spring Framework 3.2 – This section covers what's new in Spring Framework 3.2.
Spring Framework 3.2 goes GA – Exactly one year after the Spring Framework 3.1 release, SpringSource is pleased to announce that Spring Framework 3.2 is generally available now!
Rod Johnson Talks Scala in TechCast #75 – The Typesafe Blog – Typesafe is very proud to have Rod Johnson on our board of directors but what really gets us excited is when he talks about his use of Scala. In this podcast he talks about why he likes Scala and when Java developers should consider using Scala.
The Making of Fastbook: An HTML5 Love Story | Blog | Sencha – When a team has problems with HTML5, it usually stems from the fact that they take a “website” development approach to building an app, and often don't use the right tools and architectures for application development. This is what we suspected about the Facebook HTML5 app. The way that app performed — slow loading, choppy user experience in the News Feed, low framerate — exhibited the usual symptoms.
Forecast 2013: The Appification Of Everything Will Turn The Web Into An App-o-verse – Forbes – hat we are seeing are the early stages of what I call, “The Appification of Everything.” This is not about adding more icons to your home screen, though, but about a fundamental shift in how we metabolize information and entertainment. The web as the universal storage medium is being superseded by the internet as universal flow medium. Instead of thinking about the web as a hierarchical tree of documents—a Wikipedia of Wikipedias—we need to start thinking about all of that content as an underlying service layer for application-based interfaces.
Does it pay to know your type? – The Washington Post – In the graphic below, we walk through the 16 types to give a sense of how these bigger-than-life personalities fit in the Myers-Briggs philosophy. The official test is based on Carl Jung’s work in psychological typology. Ryan Smith and Eva Gregersen, creators of celebritytypes.com, helped us take the extra step of historical-figure associations.
Mountain Lion Server tutorials – When setting up a server, getting it right early can save a lot of headache later. We've put together these tutorials to get you started in setting up a server.

Links for December 5th through December 12th

Posted on December 12, 2012 by Vinny

Testing Java Code With Confidence – Doug Hiebert discusses the principles and objectives behind automated testing, TDD, Unit and Integration Testing, using asserting and mocking to write tests, and static analysis.
Open source Java projects: Storm – Parallel realtime computation for unbounded data streams – Storm is a big data framework that is similar to Hadoop but fine-tuned to handle unbounded data streams. In this installment of Open source Java projects, learn how Storm builds on the lessons and success of Hadoop to deliver massive amounts of data in realtime, then dive into Storm's API with a small demonstration app.
Google Apps revenue: $1 billion over the last year | BGR – Google (GOOG) isn’t just be a consumer tech company anymore. Unnamed sources have told the Wall Street Journal that Google ”generated around $1 billion from the sale of Google Apps and separate mapping software to businesses and governments” over the past year, signifying that Google has made significant progress in its push into the business technology market.
Android’s Google Now services headed for Chrome, too | Internet & Media – CNET News – The all-purpose alert system isn't just for Android. Google is building Google Now into Chrome as well, taking advantage of its notifications system.
Gmail for iOS Hybrid implementation – Most of the talk around the web about the new app mentions the new “native” implementation, but as you can clearly see It’s not a fully native app, but a hybrid app with carefully crafted web elements.
Integration Testing of Spring MVC Applications: REST API, Part Two – This is the fifth part of my spring-test-mvc tutorial and it describes the integration testing of a REST API that is implemented by using Spring MVC. During this tutorial we will continue writing integration tests for a simple REST API that provides CRUD functions for todo entries
Christmas gift for someone you hate: Windows 8 – Microsoft has had since October 2008 to study Android. It has had since June 2007 to study iPhone. It seems as though they did not figure out what is good about the standard tablet operating systems.
NBCNews.com video: Apple CEO on challenge of keeping company cutting edge – Steve Jobs’ hand-picked successor, current Apple CEO Tim Cook, talks exclusively to Rock Center Anchor and Managing Editor Brian Williams about Apple’s battle with Samsung, glitches with their maps app, the prospect of Apple TV and the challenge of keeping Apple cutting edge.
New Release of Micro Cloud Foundry | CloudFoundry.com Blog – Micro Cloud Foundry is a complete version of the Cloud Foundry open PaaS, but it runs in a single virtual machine on a developer’s computer. Micro Cloud Foundry exemplifies how a multi-cloud approach to PaaS can help developers easily develop and test their applications locally and deploy to any Cloud Foundry-based clouds with no code or configuration changes.
Kindle FreeTime Unlimited includes access to 1000’s of books, games, apps, movies and TV shows, just for kids – Kindle FreeTime Unlimited is the first-ever all-in-one subscription that brings together all the types of content that kids and parents love – books, games, educational apps, movies and TV shows. With unlimited access to thousands of hand-picked titles for kids ages 3-8, parents don't have to spend time (and money) guessing what their kids will enjoy, and kids can explore a world of age-appropriate content on their own – no ads, no in-app purchases.
IntelliJ IDEA 12 is Available for Download | JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA Blog – IntelliJ IDEA 12 embraces the cutting edge version of the language and provides code assistance for the new syntax, such as lambda expressions, method references and default methods. Now you can try the new features of JDK 8 in your projects.

Links for November 8th through November 10th

Posted on November 11, 2012 by Vinny

Twitter survives election after Ruby-to-Java move • The Register – Peak traffic of 874,560 Tweets per minute without Fail Whale coming up for air
JavaWorld: EasyTest(ing) in Java : A Data Driven Testing Framework is finally here – EasyTest is a framework developed to complement current JUnit's support and not to replace it. Its a developer friendly framework to writing JUnit based Data Driven Test Cases easily,effectively and quickly.
RethinkDB – an open-source distributed database built with love – An open-source distributed database built with love. Enjoy an intuitive query language, automatically parallelized queries, and simple administration.
Garlic.js allows you to automatically persist your forms’ text field values locally, until the form is submitted – Garlic.js allows you to automatically persist your forms' text field values locally, until the form is submitted. This way, your users don't lose any precious data if they accidentally close their tab or browser.
Gizmodo.com Updates: Google Voice Search Vs. Siri: Who’s the Best… – With Google’s release of its brand new search app for iOS, we decided to put Siri in the ring with Voice Search—now available on your iPhone—to see if she could defend her own turf.
Facebook open sources Corona — a better way to do webscale Hadoop — Data | GigaOM – Facebook has open sourced a new system called Corona for scheduling and managing Hadoop jobs. Corona attempts to do away with many of the problems that come along with massive-scale Hadoop operations, and soon looks to take Facebook’s Hadoop deployment beyond just MapReduce.
5 More HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed – The HTML5 revolution has provided us some awesome JavaScript and HTML APIs. I'd like to share with you 5 more lessor known HTML5 APIs — hopefully you find some of them useful!
Obama’s win a big vindication for Nate Silver, king of the quants | Politics, Policy, and Technology – CNET News – Despite some incredulous political pundits, the FiveThirtyEight statistician appears to have correctly predicted the winner in all 50 states in the presidential election.

Links for October 24th through October 30th

Posted on October 30, 2012 by Vinny

A Long Look at JVM Languages – The following section takes a quick look at the popular dynamic JVM languages, and the languages’ implementation details.
Top 20 Refactoring Features in IntelliJ IDEA – I hope this article helps you to discover the powerful refactoring functionality hidden in IntelliJ IDEA. The more you know about your IDE, the more time it can save you every day, and the more productive you become. Go ahead and get the most out of your IntelliJ IDEA!
Apache Crunch – Simple and Efficient MapReduce Pipelines – Apache Crunch (incubating) is a Java library for writing, testing, and running MapReduce pipelines, based on Google's FlumeJava. Its goal is to make pipelines that are composed of many user-defined functions simple to write, easy to test, and efficient to run.
Git and GitHub Secrets – Zach Holman – This talk covers both Git and GitHub: different tricks I've picked up after two years at GitHub, helpful advice on common gripes I've seen in support tickets and tweets, and just general nifty things that make you a faster, more capable technologist.
Citus DB: The Scalable Analytics Database – CitusDB is a distributed database that lets you run SQL queries over very large data sets. Designed for analytical queries, CitusDB enables real-time responsiveness.
Big Data Right Now: Five Trendy Open Source Technologies | TechCrunch – Let’s look at five new technologies that are shaking things up in Big Data. Here is the newest class of tools that you can’t afford to overlook, coming soon to an enterprise near you.
Windows Phone 8 review – Microsoft’s mobile platform gets hardware muscle and another lease on life – Windows Phone 8 review – Microsoft's mobile platform gets hardware muscle and another lease on life
Integration Testing of Spring MVC Applications: Controllers | Petri Kainulainen – This is the second part of my spring-test-mvc tutorial and it describes how we can write integration tests for “normal” controller methods (methods that are not using Ajax or processing form submissions).
An alternate universe – Microsoft Surface – People who dislike Apple’s approach or whose requirements are incompatible with it will always exist in great numbers, and the Surface is for them. It’ll probably sell well, especially if Microsoft can expand their retail presence quickly.
Google Web Toolkit Blog: GWT 2.5 Final is here! – Thanks to all developers who helped us test GWT 2.5 release candidates and reported issues to us. We have fixed several of these and are happy to announce availability of GWT 2.5 Final.
BootMetro – Windows 8 Metro style web framework – Simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and Javascript for web apps that wants to use the "Windows 8 MetroUI" style, without the need to run on Windows 8.
WebDB / WebSQL Databases | twoHard – Hopefully this simple example is helpful. My goal was that websql.dbtransaction method outlined above would make it easy to access local WebSQL DBs. It has for me, so hopefully it makes someone else's life a bit easier.
What’s New in Sencha Touch 2.1? | Blog | Sencha – Sencha Touch 2.1 is our next release of the Sencha mobile framework. The 2.1 release includes the following key upgrades: significant performance improvements, charting support, an advanced list component, and enhanced native support through the Sencha Mobile Packager.

Links for October 2nd through October 5th

Posted on October 6, 2012 by Vinny

JUnit Testing Spring Service and DAO (with In-Memory Database) – Java Code Geeks – This post describes how to implement JUnit tests for a Spring Web Application's Services and DAO. It is built on top of the Spring MVC-Service-DAO-Persistence Architecture Example. This example is available from Github in the Spring-Web-JPA-Testing directory.
Red Hat’s Next Steps for JBoss App Server | Architects Zone – To meet these needs we’re announcing an ambitious next phase for our application server strategy and the JBoss EAP application server, a technology collaboration with 10gen and their MongoDB database, and exciting changes to our community projects you can vote on.
Eventing with Spring Framework | Yohan Liyanage – So in conclusion, Spring does provide a decent eventing mechanism which is quite useful for implementing eventing support in applications.
Prezi’s CTO on how to remain a lean startup after 4 years – Peter Halacsy, CTO of Prezi, spoke today at DevOps Days in Rome about the evolution of the company in the past 4 years as a lean startup. He discussed how embracing failure is the only way to grow and improve the business. This principle affected all aspects of the company, from its structure to people recruitment, responsibility, technology stack and mostly the culture.
vFabric GemFire Fundamentals – VMware vFabric GemFire is a distributed data management platform providing dynamic scalability, high performance, and database-like persistence. This 2.5 hour eLearning training introduces you to GemFire Enterprises 6.5.
ReportPlus: Create and Access Dashboards, Reports from an iPad – ReportPlus is a dashboard and reporting tool for the iPad. Developed by Infragistics, it enables you to connect to any data source directly and securely with an intuitive user interface.
Wait, DevTools could do THAT? Tips and tricks for performance minded – Wait, DevTools could do THAT? Tips and tricks for performance minded
High Scalability – High Scalability – LinkedIn Moved from Rails to Node: 27 Servers Cut and Up to 20x Faster – Ryan Paul has written an excellent behind-the-scenes look at LinkedIn’s mobile engineering. While the mobile part of the story–23% mobile usage; focus on simplicity, ease of use, and reliability; using a room metaphor; 30% native, 80% HTML; embedded lightweight HTTP server; single client-app connection–could help guide your mobile strategy, the backend effects of moving from Rails to Node.js may also prove interesting.
Why you’d be stupid to bet against HTML5 | TechRepublic – Although HTML5’s credentials as a mobile development platform have been called into question, here’s why it is set to play a key role as the basis for mobile apps.
Google Refine, a power tool for working with messy data (formerly Freebase Gridworks) – Google Refine is a power tool for working with messy data, cleaning it up, transforming it from one format into another, extending it with web services, and linking it to databases like Freebase.
SOA Service Design Cheat Sheet | Javalobby – This simple cheat sheet contains all the key goals, principals and design patterns that you should be aware of when designing SOA services and contains helpful links to places where you can find more in-depth information on each topic.
Java test frameworks overview: Cucumber JVM, Fest 2.x, catch-exception – When Cucumber is a really BIG thing, FEST 2.x and catch-exception are small libraries that make life easier. There are much more tools like that. The most heavily used framework by me is Mockito. I can’t really imagine unit tests without it.

Links for September 2nd through September 12th

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Vinny

What Mark Zuckerberg really said about HTML5 – the complete quote – What Mark Zuckerberg really said about HTML5 – the complete quote
depression lies | WIL WHEATON dot NET: 2.0 – So, please, if you or someone you know suffer from Depression — with or without thoughts of suicide — please talk to someone, and get help from a doctor. As Jenny says, Depression lies, and you don’t need to let it control your life.
Unit Testing: Is There Really Any Debate Any Longer? | Dr Dobb’s – Continued resistance to unit tests says more about the organization than it does about the practice.
15 Lessons from 15 Years as a Software Architect – Ingo Rammer shares 15 tips regarding people, complexity and technology that he learned doing software architecture for 15 years.
Need Some Cache? Redis in Depth – Chris Meadows introduces Redis, explaining what it is good for, what does it take to be run, and what’s under the hood through a social networking code example.
Even Inside Microsoft, Users Rarely "Bing It" | Fast Company – And now, it appears as if Microsoft has even given up trying to make "Bing" a verb that's as much a part of our web-surfing habits as it is our vernacular.
Technical Debt, Process and Culture – Michael Feathers advices on creating an organizational process and culture that can enhance software development in a way that reduces technical debt.
100% code coverage, Hibernate Validator and Design by Contract – The Kitchen in the Zoo – While I learned that 100% coverage should be the goal, in over 10 years I have never worked on a project which achieved that. So I have never surprised to find a bug in code which I thought was "fully" tested.
Interview with Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, James Gosling – The C family of languages–C, C++, and Java–has dominated commercial programming for over 30 years. Today, all three languages are at a turning point:
Troy Hunt: 10 lessons for uncultured web developers – In the pursuit of a more globally harmonious online experience, let’s take a look at 10 lessons relating to aspects of web development with a cultural bent. Some of this may not be new to you, but all of it is relevant if you want to play nice with people from all cultural walks of life.
‘Why I’m A Democrat’ : NPR – At the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., NPR digital journalists asked delegates, politicians and other attendees to react to the statement: "Why I'm a Democrat." Here are some of those responses.
Microsoft Vs. VMware: Who’ll Be Private Cloud King? – Cloud-computing – Infrastructure as a Service – Informationweek – Microsoft unveils Windows Server 2012 just days after VMware's vCloud Suite launch. The archrivals use some similar language but take very different approaches to private cloud.
Watch my SpringSource Roo Add-ons Video | Javalobby – In this presentation, SpringSource's Josh Long and Spring Roo in Action authors Ken Rimple and Srini Penchikala introduce Spring Roo, 1.2, and then go further, exposing Roo's powerful addon-based underbelly.
Big Data Apps and Big Data PaaS | Javalobby – Enterprises no longer have a lack of data. Data can be obtained from everywhere. The hard part is to convert data into valuable information that can trigger positive actions. The problem is that you need currently four experts to get this process up and running:
Nokia, Microsoft head for Last Chance Saloon | Reuters – If the new Lumia phones do not appeal to consumers when they are unveiled next Wednesday, it could mean the end for Nokia, and a serious blow to Microsoft's attempts to regain its footing in the mobile market, analysts and investors said.
What is good API design? « Inviting Epiphany – what exactly is it about building libraries that can take up to 10 years to learn?
Mike Dellanoce’s Blog: 10 tips for getting that native iOS feel with PhoneGap – At Outbox we have been hard at work building our iPad application with PhoneGap. I wanted to share some of the lessons my team has learned so far. All of the following tips have been tested on iOS 5 with PhoneGap 1.8. Also note that these tips apply just as well to web applications running on mobile Safari.

Links for August 23rd through August 29th

Posted on August 29, 2012 by Vinny

VMware Horizon Suite is ThinApp, AppBlast, Octopus and Horizon all put together – VMware Horizon Suite brings together many of the technologies here at VMware – Project Octopus, Project AppBlast, ThinApp, VMware Horizon Application Manager and VMware Horizon Mobile, as well as the management of VMware View
MongoDB 2.2 Delivers Improved Analytics and Faster Performance | 10gen – 10gen Announces New Features Including Real-Time Aggregation Framework and Multi-Data Center Deployment for Easier Development and Operating at Scale with MongoDB
Cross-Platform Mobile Apps with HTML, JavaScript and PhoneGap – Christophe Coenraets discusses strategies for creating large JavaScript MVC apps, and using PhoneGap for accessing native device capabilities and for packaging HTML apps.
Concordion is an open source tool for writing automated acceptance tests in Java @mvorpagel – Concordion is an open source tool for writing automated acceptance tests in Java
GWT to Dart Code Migration – This video presents Dart equivalents for various GWT libraries and idioms, techniques for interoperating with existing GWT server backends, and tricks to allow Dart code to talk to existing GWT and Javascript code.
Learnng C with GDB – Blog – Hacker School – Hopefully I've convinced you that gdb a neat exploratory environment for learning C. You can print the evaluation of expressions, examine raw bytes in memory, and tinker with the type system using ptype.
Check lambda support in IntelliJ IDEA 12 EAP build 122.202 @mvorpagel – A new EAP build 122.202 of IntelliJ IDEA 12 has been released. The build contains improved JDK8 lambda inference and initial code insight features:
A Blow To HTML5 – Branch – What we’re seeing with Facebook’s iOS app is not a sign that Facebook is turning against HTML5, but rather a shift in their priorities for a native app — that the optimal mix for their app is more native, less HTML5.
The Pragmatic Architect – To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before – It’s the architect’s job to uncover the things "in between" as early as possible, make them explicit, and decide about them. This, paired with sound knowledge in relevant architecture methods and technologies, as well as their deliberate practice, is architecture mastery: thoughtful design at a software system’s pain points that ultimately decide its success or failure.
Under the hood: Rebuilding Facebook for iOS – Today we released a new version of Facebook for iOS that's faster, more reliable, and easier to use than ever before. The development of this new app signals a shift in how Facebook is building mobile products, with a focus on digging deep into individual platforms. To understand how we approached this shift, let's take a look at how Facebook has evolved on mobile.
Facebook Speeds Up iPhone and iPad Apps – NYTimes.com – The focus on native code in apps raises questions about whether Facebook is getting ready to abandon its roots as an open Web platform. Mr. Ondrejka says that’s not the case. He explained that Facebook’s mobile Web site is still where it gets the most activity. But for apps, the company found that wrapping native code around Web technology was not ideal. Many users have complained about the performance of the apps.

Links for August 19th through August 23rd

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Vinny

Using RubyMotion to Build JavaScript Based iOS Apps – Using RubyMotion to Build JavaScript Based iOS Apps
Manage Creativity in Your Company by Dedicating Time | Inc.com – How can we afford to put our business on hold for a month to "mess around" with new ideas? How can we afford not to? We would never have had such a burst of creative energy had we stuck to business as usual.
Typesafe Raises $14M From Shasta, Greylock, And Juniper To Commercialize Scala | TechCrunch – Typesafe allows developers to effectively develop robust applications that address the dual challenges of large-scale distributed “cloud computing” applications and massively multicore hardware platforms while still integrating seamlessly with the Java infrastructure,
DeftJS – Essential extensions for enterprise web and mobile application development with Ext JS and Sencha Touch – DeftJS enhances Ext JS and Sencha Touch’s APIs with additional building blocks that enable large development teams to rapidly build enterprise scale applications, leveraging best practices and proven patterns discovered by top RIA developers at some of the best consulting firms in the industry.
Future of Data Architecture: NoSQL, Big Data, Linked Data and the Cloud – In this panel, Siddharth Anand, Dwight Merriman, Ashish Thusoo, Damien Katz, Tom Wilkie and Akmal Chaudhri (moderator) answer questions on NoSQL from the audience.
Introducing WireMock – an HTTP service stubbing library – WireMock is a tool that allows HTTP exchanges to be stubbed and verified. It does this by creating an actual HTTP endpoint, rather than by stubbing or mocking the HTTP client class. It can be used directly from within JUnit (or your weapon of choice), run as a standalone process or deployed into a container with the aim of covering off a wide range of testing scenarios.
How big data can transform healthcare | opensource.com – Modern improvements in health and healthcare systems allow individuals to further amass and analyze data, and unlock even more secrets about human health and healthcare.
AppFog And Rackspace Want To Break Your App Out Of Amazon’s Walled Garden | TechCrunch – AppFog has only been available on AWS’ infrastructure, but CEO Lucas Carlson has been promising a one click migrate between clouds for a while now. What AppFog announced today is that its service would be available through the Rackspace Cloud Tools Marketplace.
Solving the Two Week Problem by Developing in the Cloud | OpenShift by Red Hat – We didn’t create a cloud-based IDE because it was novel. We did it because the consistency of the development experience is orders of magnitude better than current options. It’s only getting better from here. With our enterprise-class foundation in OpenShift, the Cloud9 platform is setting the stage for the future of development. Start your next application today at c9.io.
Listening to Complainers Is Bad for Your Brain – Exposure to nonstop negativity actually impairs brain function. Here's how to defend yourself.
6 things I do to be consistently happy – One of the most important things I’ve learned during this time is that I perform the best when I’m happy. It really does change everything. If I’m happy then I’m more productive when hacking code, I’m better at answering support, and I find it easier to stay focused.
Font Awesome, the iconic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap – Font Awesome 2.0 – the iconic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap

Links for August 10th through August 13th

Posted on August 13, 2012 by Vinny

The iPhone Has Passed a Key Security Threshold – Technology Review – In fact, in its efforts to make its devices more secure, Apple has crossed a significant threshold. Technologies the company has adopted protect Apple customers' content so well that in many situations it's impossible for law enforcement to perform forensic examinations of devices seized from criminals. Most significant is the increasing use of encryption, which is beginning to cause problems for law enforcement agencies when they encounter systems with encrypted drives.
NoSQL Database Technology: A Survey and Comparison of Systems – James Phillips presents the origins of NoSQL, followed by a comparison of various NoSQL solutions and ending with an architect’s view of Couchbase.
Big Data Architecture at LinkedIn – In this interview at QCon London, LinkedIn’s Sid Anand discusses the problems they face when serving high-traffic, high-volume data. Sid explains how they’re moving some use cases from Oracle to gain headroom, and lifts the hood on their open source search and data replication projects, including Kafka, Voldemort, Espresso and Databus.
Facebook Moving To The JVM | Nerds Central – Facebook are looking to move PHP on. Why, because clock cycles cost money. Their first approach was hiphop, a PHP to C+++ cross compiler. Now they are looking into compiling PHP to run on the multi-language VM. The presence of Facebook engineers at the Java Language Summit in San-Francisco along with there interest in implementing PHP using invoke-dynamic on the JVM is a the shock. The main seismic event will be nothing less that the complete removal of interpreters from main stream general purpose programming.
How Big Data Became So Big – Unboxed – NYTimes.com – THIS has been the crossover year for Big Data — as a concept, as a term and, yes, as a marketing tool. Big Data has sprung from the confines of technology circles into the mainstream.
Beyond the Mockito Refcard – part 2 – convenient mocking beans in the Spring context with Springockito « Solid Soft – Beyond the Mockito Refcard – part 2 – convenient mocking beans in the Spring context with Springockito
Springockito – A toolset to ease the creation of mockito mocks within spring based integration tests, – This is a small extension to spring that simplifies way of creation mockito mocks in the intergation tests' related context xml files.
Vaadin App on Google App Engine in 5 Minutes – Java Code Geeks – In this tutorial you'll learn how to create your very first Vaadin web application, how to run it on a local AppEngine development server and how to deploy it to the Google App Engine infrastructure. And all of that in about 5 to 10 minutes.
Max Little: A test for Parkinson’s with a phone call | Video on TED.com – Parkinson’s disease affects 6.3 million people worldwide, causing weakness and tremors, but there's no objective way to detect it early on. Yet. Applied mathematician and TED Fellow Max Little is testing a simple, cheap tool that in trials is able to detect Parkinson's with 99 percent accuracy — in a 30-second phone call.
Google Open Sources Leak Finder, a JavaScript Tool for Detecting Memory Leaks – Google has open sourced Leak Finder, a tool inspecting the heap of JavaScript applications in order to find memory leaks.

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{ “passion”: “software development” }

Tag Archives: testing